27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

A Ritual Work Remixed From Coil Albums.

Featuring extended & dreamlike remixes of Coil fragments spanning 20 years...

Music for the Performancoid Installation in 23 Parts "Plastic Spider Thing"

Originally issued in 2002 on Coil's Eskaton sub-label.

More information can be found here.

27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

Wolfgang Voigt has announced the GAS box set, which will be released on 28th October on Kompakt. Inside this comprehensive anthology, listeners will experience the remastered albums ZAUBERBERG (celebrating the 20th anniversary of this essential album), KÖNIGSFORST, POP and the sought-after OKTEMBER 12", all together available as luxurious 10LP+4CD edition, including longer original CD edits never before available on vinyl.

More information can be found here.

27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

The first book devoted to power electronics, written by artists, fans, and critics.

Power electronics is a genre of industrial or ‘noise’ music that utilises feedback and synthesizers to produce an intense, loud, challenging sound. To match this sonic excess, power electronics also relies heavily upon extreme thematic and visual content— whether in lyrics, album art, or live performance. It is a genre that often invites strong reactions from both listeners and critics, if not dismissed or ignored altogether.

FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR is the first ever English-language book primarily devoted to power electronics, bringing together essays and reviews that explore the current state of the genre, from early development through to live performance, listener experience, artist motivation, gender and subcultures, such as ‘Japanoise’.

Written by artists, fans, and critics from around the world, FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR provides comment on a musical form that is at once theatrical and absurdist, while bringing to listeners a violent, ecstatic, and potentially consciousness-altering experience. In considering this ‘spectacle’ of noise, how far can we simply label power electronics as a genre of shock tactics or of transgression for transgression’s sake?

About the editor

Jennifer Wallis is a historian and author, currently living in Oxford, UK. She is a fan of power electronics and has previously worked with noise act Hate-Male.

Contributors

Mikko Aspa, Tom Bench, Bindweed, Scott Candey, Nathan Clemence, Andrew Cooke, Mike Dando, Sonia Dietrich, d foist, Spencer Grady, Clive Henry, Grant Hobson, Kevin Matthew Jones, Paul Margree, Nick Nihilist, Jack Sargeant, Stephen Sennitt, Richard Stevenson, Duncan Taylor, Philip Taylor, Jennifer Wallis, Daniel Wilson, Ulex Xane

More information can be found here.

27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

It’s easy to forget that Norway shares a short stretch of frontier with Russia, right at the northernmost tip of the country. That region is where Geir Jenssen, the Norwegian electronic producer behind Biosphere, comes from, and where he has been composing his austere, disturbing and deeply textured ambience since the early 1980s.

Biosphere has released many albums to date including Substrata, voted the greatest ambient album of all time on the Hyperreal website, and has collaborated with Arne Nordheim, Higher Intelligence Agency, Deathprod, Pete Namlook and Bel Canto.

His 12th album Departed Glories is his first in almost five years and marks a new deal with the Oslo independent label Smalltown Supersound. On the cover is a photo of the Russian landscape taken more than a hundred years ago. It’s part of an incredible cache of recently discovered images by the photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, who pioneered a form of colour photography using three sheets of glass, and left us with a collection of hauntingly beautiful pictures of a vanished world that could have been taken on an iPhone.

These are one of the inspirations for Jenssen’s latest project, which he began working on this project around five years ago, while he was based temporarily in Krakow, Poland. Living near the Wolski forest, his daily walk took him past sites – beautiful and at the same time terrible – where Poles had been executed during the second world war. After researching the area he discovered that a Polish medieval queen Bronislawa, had hidden among the trees with some nuns in the 13th century to escape the invading Tartar hordes, and that a monument to her memory had been built and then destroyed by invading Austrians in the 19th.

It made him speculate about what kind of music someone like Bronislawa might have heard while trembling among the trees? Not real music, surely, but something the fears in the mind might conjure up. He went in search of local folk music, from Poland and Ukraine, and began to work with that material to transform it into something reflecting psychological trauma.

Around the same time he stumbled on Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs and was immediately struck by the way they brought history, with its long departed souls, a little bit nearer. One image in particular, of an Armenian woman in a forest in what is now Turkey, especially got under his skin. ‘The crystal clear yet haunting atmosphere fascinated me,’ he says.

All of these inspirational elements came together to provide the necessary propulsion to make Departed Glories, an album that sets the back of the neck hairs quivering in just the same way. It’s almost entirely constructed from hundreds of snippets of Eastern European And Russian folk music recordings, melted together to transform them into 17 unsettling and occasionally blindingly radiant beatless tracks. Each sample fragment is like a sliver of glass plate, and like the photos, it has left a music that is radiant, ghostly and unforgettable. 

More information can be found here.

27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

You can’t accuse Supersilent of keeping the noise down. Ever since 1997, when Norway’s finest free music oufit came together for the first time, their unpredictable noises and rapturous textures have been heard all around the world – and maybe somewhere outside the stratosphere too.

Mostly taped in an Oslo studio at the end of 2014, the band record everything on 13 live, while blasting their sound through a PA system, so that they can feel the physical air moving as if they were on stage. Tracks 1 and 5 date from 2009, immediately after their drummer’s exit. “They were tryout sessions to see how we should proceed,” says Helge. “It was a kind of research for the band to feel how it is to be three, not four, and to blow off some steam.”

All of Supersilent’s music is entirely unplanned, with all three experienced musical adventurers throwing themselves into the moment and riding the emerging maelstrom. They always manage to surprise you, whether it’s the Indonesian ritual music heard from a Scandinavian mountaintop on the opening track “13.1” or the compressed digital labyrinths of “13.9.”

The trio swap instruments with abandon: percussion, trumpet and woodwind, electronics and Storløkken’s collectable assortment of vintage keyboards. In this technologize environment, sounds are passed around, distorted and spat out again in tantalizing splurges. “It takes time to shape a band from the beginning,” says Helge, “but for us now the trio is working really well.” With Supersilent’s lucky 13, now you can be the judge of that. 

More information can be found here.

27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

Hubris continues the exploration of relentless, driving rhythms heard on Ambarchi’s Sagittarian Domain (2012) and Quixotism (2014). Where those records looked to Krautrock and techno for their starting points, the sidelong opening track here begins from the perhaps unlikely inspirations of disco and new wave, drawing particularly from Ambarchi’s love of Wang Chung’s soundtrack to William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. Leaving behind the song-forms of these reference points, Ambarchi weaves a sustained and pulsating web of layered palm-muted guitars from which individual voices rise up and recede, eventually setting the stage for some lush guitar synth from Jim O’Rourke. Arnold Dreyblatt collaborator Konrad Sprenger contributes overtone-rich motorized guitar, pushing the piece into a satisfying intersection of shimmering minimalism and rhythmic drive that smoothly builds up until the entrance of Mark Fell’s electronic percussion in its final section.

After a short second part, in which Ambarchi, O’Rourke and Crys Cole pay tribute to the skewed harmonic sense of Albert Marcoeur with a track built from layered bass guitar figures and abstracted speech, the long final piece pushes the concept of the first side into darker and denser areas. Joined by electronic rhythms from Ricardo Villalobos and the twin drums of Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, the layered guitars of the first piece are transformed into a raw and tumbling fusion-funk groove that calls to mind early Weather Report or even the first Golden Palominos LP. As this stellar rhythm section rides a single repeated chord change into oblivion, a series of spectacular events emerge in the foreground: first, aleatoric synthesizer burbles from Keith Fullerton Whitman, then slashing skronk guitar from Arto Lindsay, until finally Ambarchi’s own fuzzed-out guitar harmonics take center stage as the piece builds to an ecstatic frenzy. Few artists could hope to include such an incredible variety of collaborators on one record and still hope for it to have a unique identity, but Ambarchi manages to do just that, crafting three pieces that emerge directly out of his previous work while also pushing ahead into new dimensions.

More information can be found here.

27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

Utterly riveting modernist composition by NWW’s Andrew Liles, twisting influence from original ‘50s and ‘60s avant garde pioneers into a conceptual suite concerned with “the impotence of the masses living in the shadow of military, economic and political institutions”, and suitably sleeved in pictures of Tony and Cherie Blair before make-up (or after the mob gets ‘em).

Using a range of sonic signifiers for power, oppression and gloom such as church bells, blackened minor key baroque themes and deflated, limpid choral discord, each diffused and smeared across the stern field in a toxic miasma, Liles conjures a feeling of deep, pensive unease that strongly resonates with his conceptual intent in The Power Elite.

In typical NWW or Liles fashion, the suite proceeds seamlessly thru the gloom with scarcely any handrails to guide the way, and the ones that do appear tend to dissolve with warning, leaving his spectrally diaphanous, morphing projections as the only source of light to cling onto.

With discomfiting effect, he queasily emulates a state of submission and helplessness, allowing sounds to wash over the listener in a stilted, curdling flow of disjointed information, perhaps requiring the listener to act as non-passive impedance or resistance in order to properly process his aesthetic as rhetoric.

-via Boomkat

More information about Andrew Liles can be found here.

27 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

5th LP of mind expansion and electric truth from Stephen O'Malley (Sunn0))), KTL), Daniel O'Sullivan (Ulver, This is Not This Heat, Grumbling Fur, etc), Kristoffer Rygg (Ulver), Steve Noble (Brotzmann Trio, N.E.W.).

Hazel is the 5th record from this group of eclectic travelers, who bring their considerable pedigrees together in unexpected and original ways. Looking at the people involved, it would be reasonable to expect a massive blowout of sound, but everyone plays with remarkable and effective restraint. The music is atmospheric and layered, with bits and pieces of identifiable rock moves peeking out from under a thick blanket of hard-to-identify drift. Based on live recordings made on a lengthy tour of Italy in 2010, the recordings have been extensively edited and supplemented, but without losing the elemental sound of a group playing live together. While there’s plenty of weird ambient sound to be heard, this isn’t a sound-effects/”pedalboard” record. Like the preceding En Form for Blaalbum, Noble’s drums anchor the music. The drumming is spare and considered, sometimes lashing out with abstract punctuation, and other times laying out a Can-like groove. O’Malley’s guitar is also restrained, providing a bed for O'Sullivan's constantly morphing Rhodes, synths and electronic effects. Kristoffer Rygg contributes a rousing vocal incantation to “Ermanna” and peppers the mix with ghostly modular details. Like their other records, this is not really like anything else out there right now.

More information can be found here.

21 August 2016

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Albums and Singles

Considering Rasengan! is a documentation of the first performance this pan-European free jazz quartet ever had together, the balance of unity and chaos here is exceptionally well done. The two pieces that make up this 36 minute performance drift between what sounds like perfect synergy between the players to some all out messes of sound, both of which I have always felt is essential for this style of music. Which, of course, means this is a very impressive record.

Barefoot Records

The four performers on this record come from all parts of Europe:Portuguese trumpet player Susana Santos Silva (Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos and Coreto Porta-Jazz), French pianist Christine Wodrascka works in a multitude of styles and projects, bassist Christan Meaas Svendsen hails from Norway and collaborates with a multitude of performers (and is a member of Large Unit), and finally percussionist Håkon Berre now resides in Denmark and has collaborated with the likes of Peter Brötzmann.

Rasengan! is a performance comprised of two lengthy pieces, the lengthy "Sweatshirt" and the slightly more succinct (and more bizarre) "Death by Candiru".Of the two, "Sweatshirt" is the more conventional, but that is only relatively speaking.Immediately Meaas Svendsen and Berre create an odd rhythmic foundation via bent strings and clacking sticks, neither of which sounds obviously like the instruments the two are actually playing.Soon Santos Silva's horn and Wodrascka's piano skitter in, initially loose and chaotic.The two take turns becoming the focus, either in the form of overt, tense piano or pained, raw trumpet.A bit less than half way through the piece's 25 minute duration a bit of calm appears, with just the piano leaving a lingering tension.The sound eventually builds back up, the horn and piano sprawling all over in ebbs and floes of chaos and calm.The performance finally builds to an appropriately dramatic, loud conclusion.

While "Sweatshirt" may not sound like the most conventional work at first, it is the more dissonant turn that the quartet take on the jovially titled "Death by Candiru" that make it seem like the lighter work.At first subtle, eventually the rhythm section of bass and drum construct a slow, uncomfortable rhythm complete with weird animalistic scratching noises with piano peppered throughout.Bits of what sound like compressed air and non-instrument like noises appear, making for a more bizarre yet extremely cinematic feel.As before, the trumpet and piano trade off taking the focus, but here in a more chaotic and off-kilter form.In a great contrast to the conclusion of "Sweatshirt", here the performance seems to fall apart in a brilliant way, rather than coming to an epic, bombastic close.

There is a definite looseness throughout Rasengan! that may be fully intentional or a function of the four performers improvising together for the first time ever, but that adds to the record, rather than detracts from it.They clearly work well together and play off of each other wonderfully, but those moments where the sound becomes a bit disjointed and chaotic are some of the best parts of the record.I usually prefer jazz-based music when things get weird and dissonant, and this band does that extremely well.

samples:

• Sweatshirt (Excerpt 1)
• Sweatshirt (Excerpt 2)
• Death by Candiru

 

21 August 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Following their recent split release with legends Controlled Bleeding, this newest work from Sparkle in Grey retains the band’s improvisational flexibility, but lightens the mood somewhat. Brahim Izdag takes a lot of directions, from complex post-rock excursions to traditional folk sounds and much in between, but somehow the band still manages to make it sound like a cohesive and unified, if somewhat sprawling record.

Old Bicycle/Grey Sparkle/Moving Records

The three songs that lead off Brahim Izdag do an exceptional job of encapsulating the feel of the record as a whole."Samba Lombarda" is at first late night field recordings, complete with crickets, barking dogs, and what may even be gunfire courtesy of Matteo Uggeri's electronics, but soon transitions into rattling cymbals and distorted guitar from Simone Riva and Alberto Carozzi (respectively).The guitar and bass (by Cristiano Lupo) combination takes on an anxious, but funky sound reminiscent of the late 70s post punk scene.However on the following "Iurop is a Madness (Attempts)", the band shifts into spoken word from Zacaharia Diatta and a weird, unique reggae sound.

Then, "Iurop is a Madness (Refuse)" is all sputtering percussion samples and Eastern European pop viola by Franz Krostopovic, making for an odd balance of the peculiar and the familiar.Sparkle mix these elements throughout the album, such as melding dubby bass, Middle Eastern percussion, and noisy guitar on "Gobbastan Pt 2 (Unwelcome)", which again makes sense even with all these contrasting elements being used."Grey Riot" reprises the European strings, but placed with cheap Casio synth beats, and eventually transitioning into what sounds like a thrashed up traditional folk song at the end (and still barely resembles the Clash song it is constructed from, partially because it is sung in Chinese).

While these border-crossing excursions are all excellent, the more experimental and abstract songs were the ones that stuck with me most."Gobbastan (Pt 1) (Arrival)" utilizes processed found sounds, synthetic percussion, and noisy guitar coming together as some sort of prog rock outburst, but never fully settling down into a specific groove.The longer "Song for Clair Patterson" ends up a mish-mash of horns and metallic tinged percussion along side field recordings.Somehow even with this unconventional arrangement the overall composition is very cohesive, and subtly jazzy and funky without being trite."Brahim Izdag (Pt 2) (Fall and Rise)" also features the band creating some open, relaxed sounds but via a more traditional arrangement of synths and guitars.The instrumentation may be traditional, but the sound overall is entirely unique.

One of the biggest strengths of Brahim Izdag is how well Sparkle in Grey manage to jump from style to style, from deconstructed musique concrete compositions into traditional European folk music, but still make the pieces make sense when placed alongside each other.It is a quirky and fun record that may not take itself too seriously, but the band themselves are consummate professionals as far as their performance and production is concerned.

samples:

• Samba Lombarda
• Grey Riot
• Brahim Izdag